Essays, Not Rants! 373: They Changed It But That’s Okay The band Barcelona enthralled me with their first album, Absolutes, with its soaring melancholic piano-driven sound paired with some soulful songwriting. It was a shock to the system when their sophomore album, Not Quite Yours, instead featured a more rhythm-focused sound and the piano relegated to support in many songs. Their third, Basic Man, sounds even less alt-rock; it’s an album full of mellow synthy grooves. Each of their albums so
Essays, Not Rants! 182: Same Story But Different Pacific Rim is predictable; you’re not gonna win any prizes for pointing that out. It’s not like The Last of Us or District 9, which subvert the expectations of the audience. When you watch Pacific Rim you know what’s gonna happen; Raleigh and Mako will team up, something will happen that lets them prove themselves, and there has to be some last minute complication. Yet it’s an absolutely fantastic movie, and one of my own favorites. No, it’s
Essays, Not Rants! 138: Where No One Has Gone Before Let’s talk about space, because of Interstellar. Now, it’s hard to discuss the film because so much of what makes it Interstellar is because its based so fundamentally on the curves and turns of the plot. So for the sake of avoiding spoilers and ruining everything, we’re not talking about Interstellar’s story. Instead let’s talk about the set up; about the initial question asked by the film, the question of space travel. Many of the early
I'm skipping class on Thursday. ...to go to New York Comic-Con, particularly the LEGO panel. I'm fairly excited, especially given that I didn't go last year (and wasn't this year until Good Stuff Happened), so, yay! Also there are a couple other interesting panels happening that day I wanna go to, so score. Of course, I'm missing out on Narrative Investigations and Militaries and Militarization, two classes that are absolutely fascinating. But hey, as a friend of mine told me; make New Yo
Essays, Not Rants! 267: Normalizing The Different It’s easy to dislike folks you don’t know. They’re different. They look weird. You have no horse in their race. They’re those people. The Unknowable Other. But it’s hard to keep up this mindset, that of the Them, the Other, after you’ve met said other. When you take the time to recognize them as a person, put a face to that Other, it’s much harder to not like them. Suddenly, they become an Us, rather than Them. Meeting people, however, is h
Essays, Not Rants! 284: The Economy In this day and age, I think it’s time we talked about The Economy. In video games. A lot of games have an economy of some sort, where you earn something and spend that something on a something beneficial. In Super Mario Bros. and Crash Bandicoot you collect coins and wumpa fruit (respectively) and when you get a hundred of them it’s an extra life. It’s a simple enough exchange, one that, like provides impetus and rewards for doing stuff. You’ve got th
Essays, Not Rants! 004: The Magnitude of Medium As I hope you've noticed over my past few entries, I like stories. I read them, I watch them, I play them, I, um, listen? to them. In any case, here's something I've noticed: the medium of a story is, in the hands of a deft writer/creator, an incredibly powerful tool. Let's start with books. Everyone's (hopefully) read a book or two dozen. If not, then, well, I'm not sure what to say to you. Anyway. Books tend to be long affairs. Within them yo
Essays, Not Rants! 333: Artistic Stratification So the Oscars announced a new category. Is it something like Best Stunt, to acknowledge some of the crazy cool things stuntpeople and Tom Cruise do? Could it be Best Choreography for beautiful fights or films where the blocking of camera and actors plays like a dance? Maybe it’s for Best Color Scheme, which sounds totally arbitrary but you’ve movies like (500) Days of Summer and Pacific Rim that use colors masterfully. The correct answer is none
Essays, Not Rants! 232: Visible Diversity So I recently started Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Finally, I should say; you’d think with a Marc Webb directed pilot I’d have watched it sooner. Anyway, once you get past the somewhat off-putting title (which, as the theme song says, is a sexist term and the situation is a lot more nuanced than that), Crazy Ex is a lotta fun. It’s a musical equal parts cynical and idealistic set in a relatively mundane setting where no matter how outlandish it gets, the chara
Saw it at the IMAX midnight, as I tend to do with these sort of things, but the girlfriend's been bugging about watching it again (which, y'know, I wanted to too). Finally found time to do so today. And hot dang. There's so much done in there that makes me jealous. Like, not budget or having a baddonkey fight choreographer, smaller choices that are genius. Like putting the camera here instead of over there, or not going straight to the reveal but panning over it to build tension (see the shot
Essays, Not Rants! 244: An Asian-American Superhero I wasn't sure how I felt about Silk when she first showed up in the Spider-Man comics, but it was when she got her own series – and a narrative no longer intrinsically tied to Peter Parker – that she really came into her own. But on the on the one hand, yeah, another webslinging spider-themed hero? We've already got a lot with Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, and Miguel O'Hara in books of their own; do we need one more? The thing i
Saw a Sneak Peak tonight at a nearby IMAX theater. In a word: magnificent. Just, dang. I went with a friend of mine who's a huge Trekkie (she sat me down to watch Wrath of Khan a few months back) and she loved it too. Gotta say it's a toss up between it and Iron Man 3. But dang. Go watch it.
Essays, Not Rants! 202: There’s Gotta Be A Change! A big part of movies is the protagonist’s arc. As in they begin in one place, and end in another; they change. Tony Stark learns to take responsibility for his actions. Rey chooses to embrace her destiny. Duncan gets his own back in The Way Way Back. Change is a vital part of a story. But I’ve been thinking about The Iron Giant a bunch recently (because reasons) and something’s been nagging at my mind: Hogarth doesn’t change all that much. H
Essays, Not Rants! 230: Zombieland: A Treatise on Life in a Post-Consumer Society I mentioned it as a joke last week, but this week we’re going for it. I’m so sorry. Zombies have long been used as a means to comment on the perils of consumerism. Mindless hordes doing things without thinking for the few capable of independent thought to stand up against. Zombieland takes the conceit one step further, within the film self actualization is only possible in a world free of the shackles of trad
Essays, Not Rants! 323: Genre Bending Altered Carbon is an oddball of a show. It’s got a science fiction setting, but primarily draws on noir for a lot of its narrative structure. Beyond that, though, it draws on a whole host of other science fiction media for inspiration, to varying effect. The show is science fiction noir in the stylings of Blade Runner. And it’s really, really heavily cribbing from the Blade Runner stylebook. You’ve got flying cars that don’t look a hair out of place flyi
Well, after a brief Invision Board-based hiatus, we're back!
Did you like that video review of Tahu and Takua? I haven't done one in a while and it was fun to dive back in, especially since, over the past year, I've moved to doing video post-production full time. I was freelancing for around a year at a couple of documentary houses until last month when I started as a staff Assistant Editor a trailer house. If you saw the trailer for Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny, that was us. I had
Spoilers, obviously, for last night's episode. It's more of me thinking about this tv show! The overall pacing of the show isn't slow, it's just off. Almost like it's meant to be bingewatched.
Essays, Not Rants! 130: Background Details There’s a building I can see outside my window that’s under construction. I’m not sure what it’s going to be or where exactly it is, but it looks to be somewhere in TriBeCa. The basic structure of it is there, there’s a crane going up the side, and it looks like the skeleton of a monolith as there aren’t any external walls up yet. There are tiny lights on each floor that glint in the daylight. To my sci-fi-addled mind it looks like something you’d s
Essays, Not Rants! 156: Superheroes Are For The Birds I’ve said too many times before that awards don’t always mean quality (especially when The Lego Movie gets ignored), but that doesn’t mean I still don’t have opinions. Especially when those opinions are about Birdman. I really enjoyed Birdman. Its shot-as-if-it’s-one-take-ness got a little obtrusive at times and bordered on being gimmicky, but its strong plotting and performances helped bring it past that. It was interesting and a great m
Essays, Not Rants! 128: Of Boyhood I was finally able to see Boyhood this week. It came out over the summer when I was in South Carolina, which is not a good place to be if you want to see the latest indie film (I have yet to see Snowpiercer too). But I did see Boyhood this week and in some respects it's a frustrating movie. There's little structure, if any, to the film. Which makes sense; a movie filmed over twelve years would be hard pressed to tell a single story. A strong narrative usual
Essays, Not Rants! 169: Narrative Contracts Early on in Borderlands 2 the player encounters a fence of electricity in between them and their goal. Claptrap, the voice over the radio, tells you there’s a fusebox on the other side and that if you run fast enough, you won’t take damage from the fence. Your objective changes, now saying to run into the forcefield. So you do, and it deals damage to your shield and pushes you back. Claptrap suggests you do it again, he says you weren’t running fast
Essays, Not Rants! 171: Another Life I’m me. That’s pretty obvious. I’m a biracial guy in my mid-twenties who lives in New York. I’ve had my own relatively interesting life, but at the end of the day it’s mine. Barring some crazy The Matrix or Total Recall-esque invention, I’m only ever going to live my life. It’s the only experience I’ll get. Well, outside of certain kinds of fiction. Fiction offers a window into someone else’s life. The thing is, it’s hard to really make someone experience
